East Village Spring

I skipped a post yesterday. The gods of NaBloPoMo will be wrathful.

Well, actually, like most gods, their attentions are elsewhere and my tiny skipped post won’t register at all, other than with the Puritan in my head who says, through clenched teeth” you haf missed a post! you haf made zee commitment and haf failed zee task.”

My inner Puritan, it seems, occasionally masquerades as an extra in a bad Nazi movie.

Okay, I missed a post. But today it’s St. Patrick’s Day and the first full day of what feels like spring and we survived the Ides of March without being stabbed, all of which have to buy a gal a “whoopsie,” don’t you think?

Today had that glorious Northeast sense of “aaahhhh, we made it“: soft breeze, bright sun, sudden flowers in the corner parks. Doubtless it’s going to pour and be horrible within 72 hours of this glory but today one realizes that maybe there’s an upside to not living where it’s sunny and warm all the time (take that, LA): without the contrast of the crappy-ass weather, days like today would seem…unexceptional. Like getting to eat brioche all the time.

Today helped lift the gloom caused by the surreally bad news from Japan (is anyone else thinking that Godzilla is being re-born somewhere in those tsunami’d hills?), where the devastation seems epochal, beyond belief.

So walking in the East Village today, along Avenue B, I saw this, and it seemed like the gateway to spring:

A mosaic’d gate in a community garden, reflecting the early spring sunshine. And when I stepped through the gate to the other side:

Reminds me of one of my favorite Robert Frost poems:

How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,

The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.

I don’t know Deborah. Posting about missing a post isn’t going to make those gods very happy, and the glories of springtime seem to me the last refuge of a . . . well, not a scoundrel, but you get what I’m saying. Shape up and get back to being brilliant!